Origins
Origins: 9 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Contaminant That Became a Hormone
In 1923 the new insulin extracts did something their makers did not want: they briefly raised blood sugar. It took thirty years to crystallise the culprit, and sixty to see why it matters to the newest generation of metabolic drugs.
The Experiment That Named the Hormone
In January 1902 two physiologists at University College London cut every nerve to a dog's gut and still watched the pancreas respond. What they concluded forced a new word into the language, and a libel trial, a riot and a statue followed.
Why So Many Drugs Come Out of Venom
A snake, a sea snail and a desert lizard have each handed medicine a drug class. That is not a run of luck — it is what happens when you raid a chemistry programme that has been running for tens of millions of years.
The Hunt for the Hormones That Command the Pituitary
To find the molecules by which the brain gives orders to the endocrine system, two rival laboratories spent twenty years reducing animal brains by the tonne to a residue you could barely see. The first answer they got back was three amino acids long.
The Genome Everyone Thought Was Finished
The human mitochondrial genome was sequenced in 1981, catalogued at thirteen proteins, and filed away as complete. It was hiding genes — and they were found not by reading the sequence but by tripping over what they did.
Thymosin and the Gland It Was Named For
A peptide was named in the 1960s for the organ it came out of and the effect that organ was thought to have. Both halves of the name turned out to be wrong, and neither correction ever reached the label.
The Blood of Young Donors and a Tripeptide
Liver cells kept their character longer when the serum bathing them came from a young donor. Finding out why produced one of the smallest molecules in active research — and a fifty-year literature with one name running through it.
How Insulin Changed What a Drug Could Be
A hundred years ago a protein went into a dying boy's arm and came out the other side as a medicine. Almost everything peptide science has done since walked through that door.
The Gila Monster and the GLP-1 Drugs
A venomous lizard in the deserts of the American Southwest had already solved the problem that stalled a decade of pharmaceutical chemistry. It took an endocrinologist working on a side interest to notice.